CiM colour testing: Chamomile and Caboose

I got a lovely big pile of new colours to test and then had kiln controller issues, which means so far I have only had time to try these two!

Chamomile

This colour surprised me! Look at the difference between the rod colour and (most of) the beads. Those spacers were batch annealed because of the aforementioned kiln problems, and before they went in the kiln they were much more like the rod colour – still swirly with transparent and less transparent areas, but a yellow ochre rather than a green ochre. The gremlin went into the kiln straight away, and they all came out like this! Which frankly I find far more interesting.

A spacer close-up: I etched the left two. I’m not what I did to the warmer-coloured one differently than the others – struck it less? The stripe round the middle suggests I added a small last amount of glass to match size with the previous one. (Which I did, though I couldn’t tell you with which bead).

End-on: those green variations make me happy! The rightmost bead in particular: I just find the distribution pleasing.

I made a gremlin with little red flowers. You can see it’s opaque enough as lips and eyelid, but there’s still glow and reflected light from transparent/translucent areas. The feet are yellower and more transparent – they were done towards the end, just before I added the vine, so they get much less in-and-out of the flame. There’s an area on top of the lip that’s gone yellow again too. That’s next to where I heated and raked a bit of the vine, so that’s consistent with it being the initial colour and the green developing as it strikes more, unless you reset it.

Overall, the swirliness and colour differences remind me of some of the Vetro odds, but a lighter, non-cored colour. I’d like some more, which I hadn’t thought I would from the rod alone.

Caboose

This is a coral red. It does look slightly darker here under my halogen light than under incandescents or sunlight, but it doesn’t change nearly as much as some reds. It’s pretty uniform and not streaky, which can again be an unwanted issue with many opaque light reds.